When Butch Jenkins comes to Mardi Gras he knows he's not in Indiana anymore

Leo “Butch” Jenkins didn’t plan to come to New Orleans for Mardi Gras every year. He came in 1972, and then he just kept coming back.

“I haven’t missed one,” he says. “I was always able to work it out.”

Jenkins, 70, is scheduled to arrive from Indianapolis with his wife Jeanne (pronouned Jean Anne) on Friday, and he will be wearing his doubloon-encrusted cowboy hat at Baccus and his “chain mail suit” on Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras.

“I call it my armor,” he says. “It weighs about 40 pounds, and when I take it off, I feel like I can float to the moon.”

The reason he has an aluminum suit made out of hundreds of doubloons begins with what he calls “the Bug Van.”

In June of 1971, Jenkins drove his VW van to Louisiana for the Celebration of Life in Krotz Springs, a kind of mini-Woodstock rock festival in St. Landry Parish. He and some friends were on top of the van dancing to the music of Country Joe and the Fish when the accident happened.

“We danced so hard we caved in the whole van,” Jenkins says.

He saw that as an opportunity, so he went home, cut the top off a Volkswagen Beetle that had a big canvas sunroof and welded it on top of the van.

“I put in a platform and a barber’s chair, and you could go right up through the roof,” he says.

Pam Whitney, a young woman from Gramercy he and his friends met at the music festival, invited them to come back for Mardi Gras, so in 1972 -- even though they had no idea what Mardi Gras was -- they drove back to New Orleans in Jenkins’ unusual-looking van.

On Fat Tuesday afternoon, he pulled in line behind the last truck in the last truck parade and people started pelting the Bug Van with stuff.

“Everybody was trying to throw beads and coins through the sunroof, and we ended up with hundreds of coins, beads 3 feet deep, sandwiches and Cokes,” Jenkins says. “I guess they thought we were starving hippies.”

One of his buddies kept jumping out of the van and asking women to give him a Mardi Gras kiss.

“I bet he kissed 150 women that day, while I was driving and trying not to run into anybody,” Jenkins says. “It was just something you couldn’t imagine.”

He ended up with so many doubloons that he went home, drilled four holes in each one, strung them together with wire, and started sewing them into a vest. He was a heavy industrial mechanic by profession and all thumbs with a needle and thread, but by the next year he had the top half of a vest, and he wore it to the parades.

“It wasn’t finished, so people kept handing me coins, and I realized it was a good way to get them,” he says.

He went home and started experimenting with different kinds of glue, and by the next Carnival, he was wearing his completed vest.

“When I put it on, people walked up to me,” he says. “They said, ‘You need some pants to go with it.”

So he went back home and made himself some pants.

“The pants were pretty much finished by 1977,” he says. “I think the latest coin is from 1978.”

Jenkins, who is “pretty much a loner” at home, became just the opposite during his trips to New Orleans.

“The whole world changed for me when I put on my suit,” he says. “I was no longer just a spectator.”

And he found out he liked being more than just a spectator.

“Blaine Kern told me, ‘You’ve got one of the best costumes at the Mardi Gras,’ so I had to come back,” he says.

He married Jeanne on Ground Hog Day 1985 and brought her to her first Mardi Gras two weeks later.

“We made her a top out of coins, too,” he says. “It had ‘JJ’ on the back for Jeanne Jenkins. She still wears it.”

One year in the ’80s, somebody told him he needed to add a hat, so he did.

“I had never thought about a hat, but I paid $40 for the damn thing and covered it with coins,” he says.

He was at a flea market in Algiers when a woman told him his hat needed a stone lion for the centerpiece, so he added that, too.

“I thought, ‘Man, this is awful heavy,’ but it looked good, and it’s been there ever since,” he says.

A lot of years, Jeanne opted to stay home with the three kids and the dogs, but Jenkins still came and hung out with friends.

“I don’t drink, so I would just walk around and let people take my picture,” he says.

In 1989, when he went to put on his vest, he had a problem.

“The top was so tight I couldn’t button it,” he says. “That aluminum shrank.”

So he made a new bigger vest in 1990, and he put 20 years worth of Rex doubloons across the top of it and 20 years of Bacchus doubloons under them.

“The original one is ripped and torn from people grabbing me, but everyone still likes that one,” he says.

Over the years, some of the coins have fallen off his suit, and the pants have gotten tight.

“My waistline has continually gotten bigger,” Jenkins says. “I have a little trouble sitting down with all them damn coins on me.”

Some years he would bring the kids with him, and in 2007, he brought his grandson Mike, almost 16. He let him wear the old vest and the rest of his outfit and set him loose.

“When he came back, he said, ‘Grandpa, I got to pose with Miss Texas.’ Someone set Miss Texas on his knee and took their picture,” Jenkins says. “He couldn’t stop talking about Miss Texas.”

One memorable Mardi Gras for Jenkins was in 1979, the year a police strike cancelled many of the parades and the streets were patrolled by National Guardsmen.

“It was peaceful. We had a real nice time,” he says.

Another was in 2006, the first one after Hurricane Katrina.

“I was so worried about what was going to happen, I had to be there,” he says. “Everybody was so happy to see us come back.”

One thing that was different that year was that he didn’t have a buy a drink in order to use the facilities at the bars along the parade routes.

“So it made it a whole lot easier for me to go to the bathroom,” he says.

By Jenkins’ estimation he has at least 40,000 doubloons at home and 6,000 that are one-of-a kind.

“And they’re all parade throws,” he says.

For the past four years, Jeanne has been coming with him, and she helps him collect more doubloons. You’ll usually find them on St. Charles Avenue between Lee Circle and Canal Street.

Over the years, Jenkins has been interviewed a few times, but he always just said his name was “Butch.”

“I just never did want people here in Indiana to know I was that nuts,” he says.

What has kept him coming back to New Orleans for 40 years is realizing that here in Louisiana, everyone knows he is perfectly sane.

“It’s just my little escape from reality,” he says. “We have a good time. We get away from the cold. And it’s the only place an old man like me can go and be the center of attention.”

Sheila Stroup's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Living. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831.